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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

I think the naive approach is to think that things are black and white, absolutely good or absolutely bad, and so on by mere association. Scientifically useful results from scientists that are awful humans are still useful results on their own. A donation to a University (assuming no strings attached) doesn't make the University wrong by association, despite a donator who's an awful entity. Governments collect taxes from good and bad people and no one blinks an eye thinking the governments should lift their nose and walk away from money coming from criminals.

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It does when you know the donor is awful and you conceal the origin of the donation.

How so? I think concealing the origin is the right thing especially if you know the person is awful and you don't want to reward them with reputation points.

Bottom line, I think a donation, an idea, a contribution is useful even if it comes from an awful source, but the problem lies in whether you reward/enable the source's awfulness. I think that's the argument to make, as opposed to just focusing on whether the source of funds was a morally acceptable person.

The right thing to do is not taking the money. There are plenty of other places you can get money from. The recipient may not get formal 'reputation points' but you are overlooking informal social networks in which such things are widely known but not talked about. If you have a bad reputation, financial inducements to silence people can be just as valuable if not more so as positive public remarks are to a person of ordinarily decent reputation.

As I said on another thread, if you really want to donate anonymously to a good cause, you just call a lawyer and pay a small fee to have them to submit it on your behalf.

Of course rich people donate to charities to prop up their own reputation. That is how charitable causes get money.

If we said this must be prevented because the donor is not a truly ethical selfless person, there would be much less money going to good causes. And who would be the judge of which of us is good enough to be allowed to donate to charities?

Hiding the origin of money in case like Epstein is clearly wrong. It prevents the bright people to make informed choices - based on their moral standards, not yours - where to work at. There are plenty of scientists who don’t want their work to be funded by that kind of money.

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